ODE TO COFFEE

Coffee is the second most traded commodity on Earth after oil. So what and how exactly does it make our most favorite beverage???

COFFEE WAS ORIGINALLY A FOOD BEFORE IT WAS A DRINK!!!

Imagine a world without coffee to drink. Instead, there was coffee to eat. Wonder how Starbucks’s business would be then…crazy as it sounds, this was the case before it was discovered that coffee beans make for a powerful drink.

Coffee’s story begins with a goat, at least in legends. It is said that Kaldi, an Ethiopian goat-herd, noticed his goats acting very frisky after eating a certain shrub. He took some of the shrub’s berries for himself, caught the buzz and coffee’s future was secured.

Originally, coffee was a food, not a drink. Early east African tribes mixed the coffee berries(the un-shelled bean, also called a coffee cherry) with animal fat, forming energy balls – something like primitive power bars. Coffee also grew on the Arabian peninsula, and it was there that it was first developed into a hot drink.

WHY THE WORLD LOVES COFFEE???

Imagine hoards of people shambling down the streets, eyes half closed, incomprehensible words bubbling from their lips…they are not ‘zombies’ they just need some coffee…!!!

Previous to the 1600s people nipped at alcohol day and night because it was much more sanitary than their local water supplies. But when the English coffee-house arrived on the scene in the 1600s it changed everything……‘PEOPLE WOKE UP’. Instead of downing depressant in the form of beer and alcohol, the masses began to down a stimulant in the form of coffee. People from all walks of life gathered in these coffee houses and shared all their ideas sharing information.

According to author Steven Johnson coffee-house culture was crucial to the development to the spread of great intellectual powering for the past 500 years, the age we now call enlightenment. As we know that coffee is no secret ingredient, caffeine has a huge influence on our waking lives. Caffeineis a naturally occurring ingredient known on the streets as tri-methyl xanthines.

HOW DOES DRINKING COFFEE AFFECT US

A study in scientific reports lays it out nicely saying coffee consumption has linked to various protective effects on common pathologies such as

Cardiovascular disease

Hypertension

Alzheimer’s disease

Parkinson’s disease

Type 2 diabetes

Some types of cancer

Hearing functions

Sleep disturbance

Caffeine binds to broken DNA and it causes breakage in chromosomes in the newly formed DNA, which is why pregnant ladies should not intake caffeine.

HOW DO COFFEE CUPS WORK IN SPACE

If you tried to use a regular coffee mug, you might not get the coffee to your face. It would be trapped at the bottom of the mug. In low-gravity environments like the space station, fluids tend to get ‘sticky.’ Surface tension and capillary effects, which are overwhelmed by gravity on Earth, rule the day in space. As a result, coffee tends to cling to the walls of the cup.

The zero-G coffee cup solves these problems by ‘going with the flow’: putting the strange behavior of fluid in micro gravity to work.Basically,the liquid piles up right at the lip of the cup and keeps flowing as you sip. It pours out by the combined effects of your mouth, the wetting conditions of the fluid, surface tension, and the particular shape of the cup.

CAFE SOSPESO: BUY A COFFEE FOR A STRANGER

Café sospeso translates to “suspended coffee” and its a Neapolitan tradition. This simple act of charity involves buying an extra cup of coffee that will be consumed by someone who perhaps cannot spare the cash. This act boomed during world war II, and thus found a revival in modern times due to hard economic times. Though this tradition began in Naples, Italy, different businesses across Europe have picked up the practice as a way of spreading generosity.